


Giant

by seekingsquake



Series: Beautiful Midnight [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Bruce Banner Feels, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Childhood Trauma, F/M, Falling In Love, Implied Child Abuse, University, domestic abuse, lack of self esteem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-03
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 15:22:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2073219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce isn't a big man. Except when he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Giant

**Author's Note:**

> Based off the song Giant by Matthew Good. I don't own the rights to the song, The Avengers, The Hulk, or anything related to Marvel.  
> Please do not repost or reupload this piece anywhere without consent. If you ask, I'm sure we can work something out :]

He had always felt a bit like a giant.

Bruce wasn’t a big man, and even as a child he was small in stature. He knew this. But when he was a boy, every time he walked into any room in his home, all the attention would fall on him instantly. His mother adored him, you see, and she was hypervigilant. He would come in from playing outside, and a little later along the line he would come home from school, and Rebecca would wrap him in her arms and hold him close to her. She would make it a game of sorts, the closer he stuck by her the more of a reward he’d get. Hugs, fingers combing through his hair, little morsels of food as she prepared dinner. She spoiled him with her affection, as if if she gave him enough now it would help him survive later.

And Bruce, he loved it. He would enter any room she was in and make himself as small as possible so that he could comfortably crawl into her lap, or fit himself against the side of her body. He acted like maybe if he was good and small enough he could crawl under her skin and he’d be safe and she’d be happy and everything would be perfect. She encouraged it.

She would hold his head to her chest and he would listen to her heart beating and she would say, “That’s for you, Brave Boy. As long as you’re safe and sound, Mommy’s heart is gonna sound just like that.”

His father was everything that his mother wasn’t. Bruce would shrink himself if he had to walk into a room that his father was already in because if he didn’t he’d pose as a bigger target. If he was in a room that his father walked into, he would do his best to hide under or behind any piece of furniture he could. The less his father saw of him, the better. Even in Bruce’s earliest memories, Brian Banner looked on his son with unrepressed fear. Later, that fear turned to anger, rage, hatred. Then the looks were transferred to his mother, and the need to shrink grew even greater.

But no matter how small Bruce shrank, he was always still too big.

When his parents were screaming at each other and the sound of skin striking skin cut through all the other noises, Bruce found out that if he pressed his palms far enough into his ears and squeezed his eyes so tight they hurt, he could recreate the sound of Mommy’s heartbeat. He couldn’t figure out if that meant that the she had lied to him and his safety didn’t affect the sound of her heart, or if he was always safe and he just couldn’t tell.

✧✧✧

Bruce was eighteen when he started at Harvard University. He floated around campus for two years, making himself as small as possible to avoid being targeted by the frat boys, before he met her. She was slim, with long dark hair and blue eyes. She wore thick knit sweaters and skirts that flowed around her legs and swished when she walked. She was by far the most beautiful girl on campus, maybe even the most beautiful girl is Massachusets. She looked like she was trying to drown herself in the fabric of her clothing, and sometimes Bruce felt like he was trying to drown himself in his own skin, and it made him wonder what she was hiding from.

He had been meaning to approach her for some time, he had just been waiting for the right moment, but eventually he didn’t get the chance. He was running from the frat boys he’d spent the last two years trying to hide from. He was panting and looking over his shoulder and trying not to gag on the blood he could taste in the back of this throat. He was running and shaking and berating himself -- _goddamn it Banner, why the fuck did you let them see you, why were you so fucking large, what the fuck is wrong with you_ \-- when he collided rather forcefully with somebody.

There was a gasp, he didn’t know if it was him or the other person, and then he was hitting the ground with a thud. He rolled onto his knees and was pushing himself up, muttering, “Sorry, God, I’m so sorry. Are you alright? I should have been watching where I was going. I’m sorry. Sorry. Jesus,” when he finally looked at his collidee. She was sitting flat on her ass, her legs out in front of her, her jaw dropped in surprise.

“Shit, shit, sorry. Here, I’m sorry, God,” he stuttered as he offered his hand to help her up.

His face was caught somewhere between being an all encompassing bruise and a full on, hardcore blush. He had run her over. He had run the most beautiful girl on campus over. With his body. He was absolutely mortified. And as he looked at her looking at him, he figured that she was pretty damn mortified too.

“It’s okay,” she said to him quietly, and her voice sounded like bamboo wind chimes in an evening breeze. “It’s okay, let me look at you.” Her fingers brushed over his jaw and tilted his chin up so she could get a better look at his face, and she clucked her tongue against her teeth before brushing gravel off his shoulders.

He shook under her touch and glanced back over his shoulder, already ready to run at the first sign of his pursuers, ready to come up with some excuse for her and to bury his head in the sand so he’d never have to face the humiliation of seeing her again. Before he could extract himself though, he found her fingers wrapped around his wrist. She gently guided him down the path toward to dorms, only asking, “The Betas?” She sighs when he nods. “They’ve been giving another friend of mine trouble, too. You know, there’s a reason the University doesn’t recognize the fraternities and sororities on campus as official things. Here, your wrist is starting to swell. My roommate will be able to take care of it for you, okay? I’m Elizabeth, by the way. What’s your name?”

“Bruce.” His voice quivers a little bit, and he can’t figure out why she isn’t mad, and he can’t figure out why she said ‘another friend of mine’ instead of just ‘a friend of mine’. It sounds like she’s implying that they are now friends, but she can’t be because he literally just told her his name. _A slip of the tongue_ , he thinks, and he tries not to feel anything negative in relation to that.

✧✧✧

He volunteers to be part of an experiment about hallucinogens for someone who knows someone who knows Elizabeth. He mostly hopes that she won’t be there because hello, can someone say ‘embarrassing’, but a tiny part of him hopes that she will be because he’s never done drugs before and she seemed so genuinely kind. When it turns out that she is there, he panicked for a good three minutes before she noticed him and waved him over. “Bruce! Isn’t this so cool? You remember Amelia?”

He sat beside her and her roommate tentatively, perched on the very edge of his seat and fiddling with his fingers. He nods and tries for a smile, but he feels his face arranging itself wrong and panics again because he’s not sure he can fix it without making it worse.

“Have you ever done something like this before?”

He tried to say no but his lips don’t move right and his face heats up and he’s making a _giant_ idiot of himself, but then everyone is separated from everyone else and he’s hooked up to multiple different machines and given a little tablet to take and he’s seeing beautiful rainbows of gamma radiation springing forth from under his feet. _You can’t see gamma radiation_ , he thinks to himself, but he knows that’s what he’s seeing anyway, and it’s literally the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in his life. More beautiful even than Elizabeth. Then, as clear as day, he hears his mother’s voice in his ear, can feel the brush of her fingers in his hair and he tells himself, _you’re literally on drugs_ , and his face is wet with what he thinks is rain until he remembers that he’s indoors. At least, he thinks he remembers that he’s indoors. He isn’t sure. He can see himself telling his mother you’re dead and I miss you, and he can see himself telling Elizabeth you’re beautiful, and he can see Elizabeth telling him you’re giant, and he thinks he’s screaming but maybe he’s only screaming in his head or maybe everyone is screaming or maybe no one is screaming at all.

✧✧✧

By the time he gets around to telling Elizabeth that she’s beautiful, they’ve been sort of dating for six months and she’s forced him to call her Betty for five of them. They’re sprawled out on the couch Amelia somehow squished into their dorm and they’ve been kissing for hours when they should have been studying and it just pops out of his big, stupid mouth.

“You’re beautiful and I think I’m falling in love with you.”

He feels like throwing himself out the window when she laughs. It feels like wind chimes rattling against his ribcage. She presses kisses to his collar and whispers, “You’re a giant dork, you know that?”

He knows that he’s not beautiful. He doesn’t look like Tom Cruise or Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt. He’s not rugged or mysterious or built. He doesn’t fit the uniform of beauty like she does, and he knows that when they go out together people look at him and wonder how he managed to get with a girl like Betty. He was a giant dork, after all. Giant. But it doesn’t stop him from going out with her, and as days turn to weeks turn to months it doesn’t stop him from letting things spew from his big, stupid mouth.

“You’re beautiful and I think I’m in love with you.”

“You’re beautiful and I’m in love with you.”

“You’re beautiful. I love you.”

She never says it back, but she kisses his face like she’s praying and she touches him like she’s searching for salvation and she looks at him like they’ve just named him as the eighth wonder of the world. He tries to shrink down and claw his way under her skin so that he can be safe and she can be happy, but she stretches him out again and calls him her giant teddy bear and he wonders if he’ll ever learn how to wear a uniform properly. Not the one of beauty, never that one, but maybe one day he can wear the uniform belonging to a husband. He figures he could wear that one better than his father ever did.

✧✧✧

Her body hits the back wall of the lab with a crunching sound, and she is glittering with shiny red water. Glitters in the light like pretty stars. He doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows that when stars die they explode, and he panics because he doesn’t want her to explode. He rears back and roars, and he can hear screaming inside his head, and he shakes to get it out. It doesn’t work. He roars and roars to drown it out and stretches his legs and lashes out with his arms and busts through a wall and is running, leaping, flying to somewhere he doesn’t know. Somewhere big and open with vast skies full of stars. Hulk is giant, Hulk needs space. Hulk will not shrink anymore. Hulk’s turn now.

✧✧✧

Bruce wakes up naked, staring at a wide sky and the Iron Man mask. His first thought is always that dead stars must smell like vanilla and blood, and he can never shake it even though he doesn’t know where it came from.

“You good, Big Guy?” Tony asks, and he doesn’t flip up his face plate like usual. Bruce thinks it must be broken. Or maybe the suit ran out of power. He doesn’t know how long Hulk was out. “Big Guy?”

He just sighs. Even when he’s small, someone is always trying to remind him of giants.


End file.
